August 30, 2003

Techno Shopper

Satellite Laptop

I didn't waste any time when I went back to Seattle. I arrived Friday night and Saturday morning Mom and Kristin took me to Costco where I purchased a gorgeous Toshiba Satellite P-25 with a 17" monitor, then to Best Buy for an iRiver mp3 player with 512 megs of storage. I used the Satellite to create a multimedia presentation of "Beautiful Leaf of Autumn," a poem that my Dad wrote. I narrated it, incorporated some photos he took and set it to a piano piece called Canadian Rockies that he really liked. When I visited him in December of 2001 after his heart surgery, we talked about putting it together. He would have liked the way it turned out.

The iRiver was absolutely imperative for Budapest marathon training. During my one really long run before the Stockholm marathon, I had to listen to the same playlist 3 times because my Rio only has 32 megs of space. So you can appreciate the urgency of the situation here. With the iRiver I could do an ultramarathon and still not hear the same song twice. And just the experience of going into Best Buy was worth half the cost of the player. It was MASSIVE, clean, well organized, filled with fun techno things at low prices, and the staff was cheerful and helpful. What a contrast to the Tottenham Court Road experience I'm used to.